Paul Wolfowitz on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and a Life in Foreign Policy | Uncommon Knowledge

Upon withdrawing from Afghanistan last year, President Biden said our involvement in that country had stalled. Regarding our involvement in Iraq, former President Trump said during the 2016 campaign, citing obviously that the war in Iraq was a big mistake. Our

wars

in Afghanistan. and Iraq to huge mistakes or were they a

policy

maker who played a central role in both Paul Wolowitz on Rare Knowledge Now Welcome to Rare Knowledge I'm Peter Robinson, born in Brooklyn Paul Wolowitz grew up in Ithaca, New York, where his father taught statistics at Cornell Dr. Woltz earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and then a doctorate in political science at the Teitaria College of Chicago, although Paul Wolowitz, a student during the 1960s, was influenced by the events of World War II , particularly the loss of his father's family in Poland during the Holocaust and the use of atomic weapons in Japan decided to devote himself to International Affairs, now a member of the Hoover Institution.

Paul Wolowitz has served as director of

policy

planning at the state department as ambassador to IND Indonesia as undersecretary of defense for policy as Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Undersecretary of Defense and President of the World Bank, Paul Wolowitz is perhaps best known as a policymaker during the

wars

in Afghanistan and during the first and second wars in Iraq, our subjects today 911. Let's start there Paul September 11, 2001 Terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers of New York and against the Pentagon in Washington. The terrorists also tried to send a second plane to Washington, but the passengers fought back and the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field one morning. just under 3,000 Americans lost their lives where Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolowitz was on the morning of 9/11 how he heard the news what he remembers thinking I'm embarrassed to say I was in the building the reason I'm embarrassed is when we first saw the planes heading for the towers my dumb reaction was this is an aeronautical error my boss down the hall Donald Rell immediately thought no this is terrorism he thought it immediately I think that's okay so when you say you were in the building, you mean the Pentagon, you were there, the Pentagon, yes, right on the side, from there, evil point of view, the side they should have hit, luckily for the rest of us, they hit the side new reinforced and that's where the plane caught fire and the The whole building is a huge building.

It shook and again you could feel it, you could feel it, you could feel, occasionally there are earthquakes in Washington. I thought maybe this is an earthquake. I'm embarrassed to say that, but very quickly they evacuated us and then the R cell. Security came out and took me to the building where we were sitting in the command center while the building was filling with this type of sulfuric smoke and I finally told him, Mr. Secretary, because you do not call the people in those positions by their name. Boys in uniform and women in uniform cannot. I had to tell him not to tell people to be nice and call him by his name, so I said, Mr.

Secretary, you have to get out of here and he said no, Paul, you. I need to get out of here, we can't both be here, so they sent me to the old Cold War headquarters, which was 30 years old, Old Line phones, and by the way, you couldn't call, make a phone call. Washington because all the cell networks were blocked and my poor daughter said she spent I don't know how many hours not knowing if she was alive and I had another experience like that that, to be honest, made me understand what the families of our service members. spending every day of the year for a year where they are deployed not knowing what is going to happen to them and dreading the moment when someone comes to the front door and notifies them that it was something bad, it is very, very They are hard on the families and deserve all the recognition we give them.

Well, I'll explain that to you because that's the background to everything we're going to discuss. Well, Afghanistan, the Taliban regime had allowed terrorists to use Afghanistan. as a port or base for training, the United States invaded Afghanistan in October, just weeks after 9/11, and in November the Taliban were expelled from the capital, Kabul, and on December 9 they were forced to abandon their main base in Kandahar, how did we do it? The decision to invade Afghanistan was made quickly, relatively quickly, a few weeks pass, but only weeks, and how do we mount a successful operation so quickly? It's surprising, we'll get to the notion that things stalled, to use President Biden's phrase, Come to that, but in those first few weeks it seemed to be a surprisingly quick military success.

I think it was surprising and I think when we met with the president of Camp David two days after 9/11, no one expected that tan could fall like that. quickly and being forced out of Afghanistan, but it was a combination of really heroic Special Forces guys on the ground, they were all men. There are also some women in this picture, anyway, who were one of those who were put on horseback by one of the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance who at least one of them had never ridden a horse in their

life

but They were doing this and they were calling from the front lines.

B52's attacks and B52's attacks shake the entire terrain around you and some of these were in what they call dangerous cloth, which is closer than what you should call an attack on yourself, but that allowed the heterogeneous troops of the Northern Alliance just eliminate the Taliban and drive them out of Calabo, even that's fine, so you mentioned B-52 and when I hear the word B52 I think of mash and Korea and Vietnam, this is a gigantic plane and Frankly, in some old-fashioned ways, it's a big truck in the air that throws out huge pieces of ordinance combined with what we have special. forces, it seems to me as if they were the entire Pentagon, which in Vietnam demonstrated an inability to think on the ground, if I may, and in Afghanistan we quickly learn to think by adjusting Innovation, it is as if it were not carried out from the Pentagon from Vietnam, but from Silicon Valley or something, so how did that happen?

I think first of all, special forces are special for a reason, ah, but you also said the best thing we did, incredibly, the best and, uh, motivated and incredibly smart, uh, smart guys, it's um, but there was also I think, an important lesson learned from a different war than the one I assume you're getting at, which was the first Gulf War, yes, because during that War I was kind of an action officer to try to keep Israel out of the war and part of it meant and you you are, let's go to this, hold on to that thought, let me set this up because let's go to the first Iraq war.

I started on September 11, 2001. The first Iraq war takes place in 1990. Let me set it up yes. Maybe so, but let's go back to your thinking in August 1990 Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, sends a force of 100,000 men to the small but very wealthy country of Kuwait, he invaded the country in a matter of hours in January 1991 President George H W Bush, the elder, not the son, leads an international coalition that includes half a million American troops to invade Iraq. First we have an air campaign, then we begin ground operations and the ground operations move very quickly in just hours. 100 hours we sweep the north.

In Iraq we destroyed and dispersed the entire Iraqi opposition. Iraq quickly withdraws from Kuwait, we essentially expel them from Kuwait and in February President George H. W. Bush declares a ceasefire that ends the war. Well, we'll come back to this because there are questions about whether we should do it. he has gone after Saddam Hussein, we will come back to all that, but there we have in August 1990 a huge force, half a million Americans come in and again they make it quickly, can I correct one thing? actually he went to the Northwest and the reason they went West he threw a bait and the person who first came up with the idea of ​​the bait was I think later an older fellow who is Hoover called Harry Ron Harry Ron, the late Harry Ron, a colleague of ours here and He brought that idea to me as Under Secretary and I took it to Cheney and Chainy took it to the military.

If they had given it to me, they would have said oh, you don't understand, no, no, no, it's not that personal, but they, unless you're the secretary of defense, they're not going to do what you tell them, but when Cheney said I want to see what you can do going west, at least they had to try and in the end they found out that the objections they were raising didn't make it impossible so we turned around to the west and this is to outflank them instead of facing them head on. forehead. Yeah, so they were fleeing Kuwait almost before.

We start in Kuwait I almost see it well and to me it is also an illustration of the difference between acting on a plan created very quickly and taking some time to work on the plan. Bush 41 worked on a plan and got a good one in the end. At that point it was over and I would say the same thing about your son in Afghanistan, but let's go back to the lessons of the first Gulf War that one had in mind in Afghanistan, which is that if planes bomb from the air, they look for moving targets in that place.

In the case that we were looking for Scuds in Iraq, those are their intermediate range ballistic missiles and the planes were not working very well, but when you put Special Forces on the ground, they could direct the planes to the targets, but the problem in the first war. It was that they couldn't communicate very well with the pilots, so the pilots didn't know the coordinates of what they were supposed to attack. I remember just before 911 I met with General Jack Ke, who was then the Army's vice chief of staff. and I said, uh, have we solved that problem?

He said, oh yeah, we fixed it okay. It turned out that we had arranged it to the maximum so that the communications between the Air Force and these horse soldiers in Afghanistan were almost instantaneous and where then the horse soldiers are with the Northern Alliance, they are deep in the Asian continent and where were the bases where the B-52s flew from, they call their cones the continental United States, they flew from this country, they really, really, all refueled. True, they are amazing men on horses giving detailed instructions to the planes that are refueling and taking off from the continental United States and flown by the grandsons of the original pilots.

Those planes were so old they're unbelievable, so sometimes the Pentagon gets things right. yes no that's that's that's that I that lesson is woven in here because they also do things wrong and of course what we want to discover is what are the circumstances under which these things go well January 29, 2009 President Bush leaves The office and President Obama will swear they will return to Afghanistan as the conversation continues, but at that time, when President Bush leaves office and President Obama takes office, we will return to Iraq, but at that time what was the view of the conflict in Afghanistan.

We had achieved a quick victory in late 2001 and we are still there in 2009 and what was the vision for our involvement in Afghanistan as the Bush 44 administration ends? It was still a very fragile situation because we didn't really have a government. there that was able to function on its own, they were very dependent on us and secondly, they were very vulnerable to infiltration from Pakistan. What I think is underestimated in both conflicts is that we never eliminated sanctuary in Pakistan. Pakistan was supposedly an ally, but a very treacherous one and we never did anything about the Iranian sanctuary in or the Syrian sanctuary in Iraq and of course those were our enemies who were and still are so um it's kind of a cliché about insurgencies yeah they have a safe Sanctuary outside it is very difficult to defeat them all back to Iraq once again Hussein takes Kuwait in August 1990 we invaded in January 1991 we quickly managed to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait I returned to the question that still lingers but we leave it at the power this big mistake Well, oh wait, here's the then Secretary of State, James Baker, and he's speaking.

He is quoted here in 2001. He Quotes Armchair generals love to say why you didn't eliminate Saddam. They don't understand that the only way would have been to occupy. That great Arab country, in contradiction to everything we promised the rest of the world, we built an authentic International Coalition telling the world that we had a limited objective and that was to liberate Kuwait if we then went on to eliminate the Iraqi regime and overthrow Saddam Hussein we would have been doing something that our allies had not signed on to. There is a very important correction to this and I don't know why Baker left it out.

I was with him on his first trip to the region. After the ceasefire, which I think was a terribly premature thing declared by us, we had a discussion on the plane en route, where he indicated skepticism about these rebellions that hadstarted in the south of Iraq, led in the south by the Shiites and then a little later in the north by the rebellions of the Kurds against Saddam Saddam yes against Saddam and uh, I remember saying that the sh, the Shiites of Iraq were Arabs and not Persians, they were not willing to be dictated by Iran and one of their subordinates said it correctly. but it is beside the point that the hisbah in Lebanon are Arabs and not Persians, but they are also very anti-American, but I said that they should not just assume that the important point here is not what I said, it is that when it came to Saudi Arabia, their first meeting was with Prince s Aliso, the

foreign

minister and Bonder, Prince Bond, the ambassador in Washington, who was a kind of second

foreign

minister and in that meeting that I attended I did not attend the one who was the king , but in that meeting those two Saudi leaders spent, I would say, between half an hour and 45 minutes pleading with Baker to support the Shiite rebellion in Iraq, most people don't know that. this is a fact, it is a non-contradictable fact, I published it in several languages, not really the ones I speak as farsy, but I wanted to make sure it came out, but unfortunately it is still not believed, but it is absolutely correct, they said fisel and bandar saying support. the Shiites, our co-religionists, or they said let's get rid of Saddam Hussein, it's interesting, they said that Saddam Hussein is like a wounded snake, you have to cut off his head, that means you have to support these rebellions and then they said and one could I say, I don't like it. , not quite honestly, let me be diplomatic, we are not afraid of the Shiites of Iran or Iraq, the truth of the matter is that they are much more afraid of the Shiites of Saudi Arabia, but it doesn't matter, the point is fine.

For them the most important thing was to get rid of the evil man who tried to take over the entire Gulf and if those men cooperated with the Shiites, that's what had to be done and we just dismissed them and ignored them, instead we went ahead with the un ceasefire that allowed Saddam to even fly our helicopters, although he later started using them to massacre Shiites from the air, was unnecessary and if I were to learn one lesson from that experience it is if you have time, take the time, don't rush We rushed because the American press was talking about the so-called highway of death, because we were bombing many fleeing Iraqi troops who were harmless.

It seemed like we were massacring people; that was the way if you watch the evening news. that was what it looked like and all we had to do was stop killing them instead of taking the highway of death from Kuwait back to Iraq, we opened the door to the Highway of death from Iraq to southern Iraq, from Baghdad to southern Iraq, we allowed the representative Republican guards to move freely and begin to massacre the Shiites and we saw this from the south bank of the river and some of our soldiers that I have spoken to since then were dismayed that we did not do more to help them and believe me, the Shiites remembered it.

They remembered it 20 years later, okay, Iraq, part two, so to speak, I know you quite well, we have had conversations about this and you, you, have convinced me that the correct way to think about Iraq is almost like a war in two phases, so to speak, okay, Iraq, part two, you WR from a meeting at Camp David, just a few days after the 9/11 terrorist attack, we now decide to go to Afghanistan immediately, the conversation shifts to Iraq , quotes Secretary of State Powell, Colen Powell, Secretary Secretary of State Powell warned that confronting Iraq would make it difficult, if not impossible, to form an international coalition.

Rumsfeld responded to that and here you quote Donald Rumsfeld: A coalition that is unwilling to confront Iraq is not a coalition worth considering, which is why we have a basic disagreement between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of State. Defense How did it come to be that the president decided to invade Iraq anyway? It's interesting because I didn't know any of this until I saw someone's notes at the time he was writing that. article um, he had had a meeting with the National Security Council about him when I was at the remote location and not at the meeting, so I was not the VR note taker at that meeting.

Sorry, this is a meeting chaired by the president and one day, one day later. 9111, okay, and Rumel was talking about the fact that this is a much bigger war than just Afghanistan and we need to make sure we go after the terrorists wherever they are and he said Iraq is one of the places we need to pay attention to first . Especially since Saddam Hussein has basically threatened us by saying, "I think the line that was in his open letter to the American people was something like 'you reap the thorns that you have sown and if you don't fix yourself,' I'm paraphrasing if they don't get fixed." shape and behave well, there will be more to come, more like this, they deserve 911, we, in fact, deserve 911, right and but not just with the statement that means not the way Clinton did it? with what were called pin attacks.

I want a new government were his words, meaning what we ultimately did, but I think in his mind and in hindsight he would absolutely agree with For him, it wasn't so much the Coalition that he was. had to worry. It was difficult to form the Coalition in that sense. Po was right, but not because of Afghanistan, it was actually easy in that sense. I guess it was worth it, more importantly, I think the. American people thought Afghanistan was where they came from, yes, and from a political standpoint, I think he really needed to take the country with him and he really needed to act convincingly with what was most commonly perceived as the real problem, while that Iraq harbored terrorists who supported terrorists who financed suicide bombers in Israel, but we don't count Israel because they weren't Americans, just as we don't count Pakistanis who financed terrorists in India because they didn't kill Americans, but I think you had to look at it more broadly and this was a man who trained terrorists who had plans to create his office.

Your US military equivalent with the advanced research projects agency was perfecting roadside bombs in the name of counterterrorism, sorry, it's not counterterrorism, it's terrorism and it was probably mostly against the Kurds and their internal opponents, so the man was dangerous and if we hadn't discovered him after or as a result of the first war, we would have a window into what he was doing and we had discovered that he had weapons of mass destruction, he had programs in place, wasn't he absolutely? In fact, I think what's interesting is that 10 years before that war in 1981, the Israeli Air Force eliminated the The first step in their nuclear program was a reactor that was going to produce plutonium that could be used for bombs and that was in 198 8181 81 and in fact I remember that there were people within the Administration who felt that we should condemn Israel for this attack.

I never thought that and I became good friends with an Israeli general named David, who planned and executed the attack. It was pretty brilliant tactically, but we had to bomb it again in 199, 10 years later, when we were the ones we bombed. He took it out again and he took it out because it was almost working again so he had made two very costly attempts for a poor country like Iraq to establish a nuclear program to establish the foundations of a nuclear program and he built because when we got there after that war after the ceasefire and the inspectors came in discovered not only the nuclear program, but that they were pursuing nuclear weapons through three routes, one of which was the nuclear reactor business, the other was centrifuges and the third is something called electromagnetic separation, which was the first technique we used at Oakd during World War II;

In other words, they were very serious about the goal of getting a nuclear bomb and if it had not been for Saddam's mistake of invading Kuwait a couple of years ago as well. soon might have had a nuclear weapon when it did and then we learned something about biological weapons during the first war, the first Iraq war that we then took into account when deciding to participate in the second Iraq war was that a factor, uh, yeah. but it took us a while to get it right, he had a very active biological weapons program that included the development of anthrax and the inspectors who went to Iraq thought there was something there but couldn't find it, so one of his close relatives is dangerous to be a Saddam's close relative decided to defect to Jordan and told us to go search the chicken farm near my house and we will discover the documents describing our biological weapons program and this was not a new idea.

Because in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, there was a lot of attention paid to the biological threat, there was something called the Heartt Rudman Commission that looked at this and there was a very scary exercise done at John's Hopkins called the Dark Winter, which showed what What would happen if the small cash was revived and we had a small cash epidemic, it is one of the most difficult things to address, almost impossible, so in the '90s, under Clinton, a lot of attention was paid to the theoretical fact that there could be a biological threat. and then what people forget is that a week after 911 some members of Congress and some journalists started receiving letters with evil dust and that they were anx wars, so the idea of ​​a biological threat became very, very vivid to the less for The people in the White House not necessarily the entire country because they weren't, the two were not clearly associated and to this day it's not entirely clear, I think who sent those letters, although they believe they do.

Can I interrupt? watch this, kids will watch this show, we're filming this at Stanford University and, uh, this year's Stanford freshman will have been born after 9/11 and will have no memory of the invasion of Afghanistan, so that what I hope this conversation accomplishes is something that points to what happened right before you were born, and when you mention that the possibility of anthrax became a vivid possibility in Washington, I suddenly remembered that I was here at Stanford a day when the entire campus went on alert because someone thought they had seen anthrax, it turned out to be a crumbled cracker.

I'm not making this up, but the level of nerves was such that they closed the campus. People in protective suits approached this crumbly salt and the people. I felt that way all those years ago in the month after 911. I just wanted to back up your point since they say it's um and that has been completely forgotten and that and a lot of the people who as you point out never forgot it because they didn't, they weren't even born at that time, they weren't there in the first place, so one thing that I hope we can work on a little bit in this interview with this conversation is that someday, when this is less political, historians will look back and ask the question that I think needs to be asked, but historians don't like to ask what the world would be like 10 or 20 years later if Saddam had still been in power.

I'll ask that, and by the way, by the time the Iraq war is no longer divisive, Paul Wolitz and Peter Robinson will be playing golf in a different arena that won't happen anytime soon. Paul let's go back to the sequence of events that lead us to the president of Iran. Bush knowing that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait knowing that the Iraqis tried to assassinate his father knowing that Saddam Hussein had made not one but two very serious attempts to develop archival materials for nuclear weapons knowing that he had massacred his own Shiite people and tens of thousands and later The Kurds knowing that he had used chemical weapons again against his own people.

President Bush, I'm sorry, I just insist that his subjects were not his people, but it doesn't matter, I'm sorry, I'm choosing his subject. His subjects. His subjects. President Bush decides to go in and go in. In this war we committed around 150,000 Force soldiers and that, to me, is an astonishing fact in itself. A decade earlier we felt that we needed half a million to face Iraq and now the number has been reduced to 150,000 as a military matter. What does this reduction of forces mean? I suggest that we suddenly felt that we had felt much safer from smart weapons, new technology, what, why, why a smaller Force for the second time.

I think it is best summed up in one sentence. I think it came from General Tom, Tommy Franks, it could have been. Rumil himself kills with speed, kills the enemy, if you can move faster they can react and therefore entering with large armed formations is not necessary and they slow you down, it is not the way, so it is true that his goal is going to the stock market, which perhaps some would say too quickly. leaving a lot of uncontrolled territory behind them and not bringing in a huge force that would occupy Baghdad, but I tend to agree with Baker on many aspects and the quote you said before you occupied Iraqshould never have been our goal, so I think you get into this argument about whether the force was too light or not, the fact is that because it was so light and it moved so fast and it did so because of the close coordination between the air power and land power, they did not need to crawl slowly. moving artillery behind them, for example, they had the Air Force over their heads, but it seems to me worth emphasizing that twice in a matter of months the United States military performed brilliantly, three weeks to achieve a total success in Afghanistan and approximately the same amount of time from the invasion of Iraq to the fall Saddam Hussein runs out of the city and Baghdad falls and in that magnificent moment things would go badly as I say, but that magnificent moment when the people in Baghdad tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein we had won, we had won the notion that the mission was accomplished was not totally wrong.

Fair enough, am I right about this or am I getting a little carried away from a strictly military point of view? You are right, yes, from a strictly military point of view. Well, in a way, can I? Of course, bring something real, although you know more than me, Paul, that's why you're here. Well, I'm telling you something I didn't know, but I received a phone call from a friend and it was the same day as the statute. went down, so on April 9, 2003 we entered March and by April 9 that statue falls and by the way, there was a two-year gap between Afghanistan, okay, we, SP, no, it's important because I think we spend a lot oftime. too much time nagging about what the goal should be if we do the Iraq thing and we never figured it out, but eventually we figured it out just by doing it, but anyway this friend said you needed to read the Washington Post.

A retired colonel named Gary Anderson has it all figured out and Gary Anderson was a retired Marine. and what he said was that he wasn't an Arabist, but he said that if I were Saddam Hussein I would plan to fight the Americans after they get here with an urban girl in the war and that's exactly what we were running into then, if there weren't been by R. We started with what we started meeting very early, so I hired Gary Anderson as a consultant and asked him to go to Baghdad and talk to the people there for me.

At that time we already had an American occupation government, which I believe. It was one of our biggest mistakes and he started talking to people in Vietnam about how General Abrams had changed things through a strategy called inklot that focused on creating areas where civilians were safe and comfortable so they could snitch on the enemy for us. . and intelligence on the enemy was what we desperately needed. He talked about this in Baghdad and someone said, that's Vietnam, you're talking about Vietnam, this isn't Vietnam and he showed him the door, someone from our military command structure, well, actually, he was a civilian there. case, but I think the military was oblivious, equally oblivious, okay, our military didn't like being told about Vietnam, they thought they had overcome the Vietnam syndrome, okay, so of course I would be interested to know what will happen next in Iraq. you know the date where date the problem we have what looks like a brilliant victory as you said a moment ago in purely military terms and then things go wrong we have an insurgency we have urban does not stay urban spreads throughout the entire country of improvised explosive devices (IED) is in the insurgency and it's bloody and ugly and we can't seem to do anything about it until years later when we have the surge again, we'll get to the surge in a moment, but when do things go wrong?

Where you come out with the Falls of Baghdad in a matter of weeks and things are already starting to go wrong for those who have eyes to see? I think Gary Anderson predicted it, but I don't think the eyes took a while to get. organized, let's put it that way and I think what I remember very clearly is Barbara Fast, major general in charge of military intelligence in Baghdad or in Iraq for us and some of our staff spent their nights plotting everything that we knew about where the terrorists were. where these attacks were happening and developing a full picture, as they call the human terrain, of where the insurgency was, which also pointed to the fact that much of it was based in Damascus, which is where many of the senior Iraqi leaders had fled and where they had safe harbor across the Syrian border, including billions of dollars.

I was told at the time in the Syrian banks, then they were financing the insurgency that many of the foreign fighters were coming in through In fact, they later gave me the passport of a couple who were killed in the South by the Marines and in the entry page says that for the entry visa the purpose of the visit to carry out Jihad one has to camp and have a good time and there were terrorist training camps in Iraq, that was no secret, a place called Salon Pac, they were training them by hundreds or thousands, but there was a kind of skepticism.

I would say because there wasn't and that's how gorilla operations operate, there was no centralized command and control, uh, it was a lot of individual cells operating, which is probably what we're also seeing the Israelis are seeing today in Gaza. I don't want to make a comparison, but in any case, it's the way they operated, so I couldn't see centralized command and control except to some extent in Damascus. Paul. Could you mention Colonel Anderson's opinion that if it were Saddam Hussein, he would essentially hand over Baghdad and then start fighting if we were deceived in some basic way?

I mean, if you look at Napoleon's march towards Moscow, that also looks like a brilliant military victory. Until you realize that the Russian intention all along was to retreat and retreat and retreat and hit Moscow and then start the counterattack. "Error in planning was it actually a brilliant military victory or was it a genuine military victory and the other side started improvising on the Peter. I think that's a great question and I think what I would say is a couple of data points that they point to what you." What I'm suggesting is that we were receiving intelligence, I don't remember when, but I think pretty early on Saddam was telling his generals that once the Americans get into a certain ring, then I'll pull out my secret weapon and they deduced that to I mean a nuclear weapon, but I think it can also be interpreted that his secret weapon was exactly to have an urban insurgency, as I see it, and it is said that his real hero was not Hitler, his real hero Stalin, who is the Soviet model of the What are you talking.

There is another piece of information that I believe was in October 2002, 6 months before the invasion, he announced that he was going to release all the prisoners as a gesture of magnanimity and our intelligence experts interpreted this as Saddam trying to gain popular support. You must be crazy, that's not how this man gets popular support through Terror, not by freeing people. A New York Times photographer named Tyler Hicks, I think, and I think you can find this maybe still online. I went to Algar prison, the famous prison where we later made a mistake taking some photographs, the Iraqi guards tried to confiscate the film from his camera, so he handed the battery to a brilliant man.

He obtained these gruesome photographs, including photographs of where the political prisoners were held. trapped inside because they closed the door so the political prisoners couldn't get out and they were crushed. People were crushed to death in the rush a few months later, after we were bagged. I asked an Iraqi dentist who was a blogger at the time I said: do you have any idea why Saddam was releasing the prisoners? and I said some Americans think it was to gain popularity. oh no, all I had to do was listen to the radio from Baghdad because he was saying at that time that we Americans will never take Iraq intact, so I think to some extent it was part of a strategy of exactly and you couldn't burn it Iraq in the same way that they burn parts of the Soviet Union, The Killers could be released exactly, very well, until the surge that we are reaching like lightning. speed here Paul, I don't know, it's television.

I feel bad about that because it seems like every month is hope. I'm not too deep in the weeds, no, no, but things are going badly, there is an insurgency that we seem incapable of powering. Let's do something about it and then we'll have a surge in January 2007. President Bush announces a plan that has two parts: one is more people, more troops. President Bush announces a plan to increase troops in Iraq by 20,000 and then the second part is the inkblot. I'm not sure I'm using the right term, but they are new tactics, the ink block Tac tactics, that David Petraeus, who becomes our commander in Iraq, understands and ultimately stabilizes Iraq and achieves a semblance of order and peace in the whole country.

At this point, as I understand it, the idea of ​​the increase is largely the suggestion of General Kean, who by then was already retired. Jack Kean suggests it to a member of the vice president's staff. Libby scooter Libby takes it to Vice President Cheney. Vice President Cheney takes it. to President Bush and President Bush honks at the Pentagon, if I understand the General chain, that's how it worked, but what this means is that the Pentagon, which you have already described as a huge building with a budget at that time of half of I think by then I had already crossed, now it is much more, of course, but at that time it was already 500 million dollars more.

This is the largest organization in human history with troops, civilian contractors, and weapons of every kind you can imagine. The Pentagon does not present a raise, it comes from outsiders and is effectively imposed on the Pentagon. It is more or less correct: is there even a grain of Truth in it because it requires an explanation? If there is, I would say there's more than a smidge, but I think about um to give credit where credit is due um the key figures that you mentioned there, General Jack Keane, who would have been Chief of Staff of the Army except for his wife, his wife was sick, as I remember, yeah, we begged him three times and um He said no for a good reason and then General Petraeus, I mean two two brilliant military minds who spoke to authority, tough, smart, experienced, for What they were in the Pentagon, they produced these men too, absolutely fine, but Petraeus was sent. to Fort Lenworth to basically work on counterinsurgency doctrine and I don't think it was much of a promotion, but the Comons, excuse me, there's a war going on here.

David Petraeus understands counterinsurgency tactics and has been told no, don't go here. going to Fort Lenworth Kansas and writing a book is not what you do with someone you're trying to make a leader, so I think it really took the combination and, by the way, there are a lot of other people who were involved in this. total change of strategy and it's a case where success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan, but certainly having Jack Keane embracing Petraeus and promoting Petraeus, uh, I think it made all the difference in the world and it certainly did.

He did, I think with the vice president and me. I think with the president um and again he spoke with the authority of a man who had had four stars on his shoulder, which is a big deal in that world, an important point, although that name increase applies to him because, um, yeah involved an increase in troops, but you said, I believe correctly, 20,000, in addition to 140,000, it was marginal, it was not huge, but the most important thing was the change in strategy and the idea that the mission of the post-surge forces was mainly to go to bad neighborhoods and make them safe for Iraqis who wanted to cooperate and hand over to the enemy, it was the same model that Abrams used in Vietnam, as I understand it from the history books, okay Paul, I'm going to dwell on this one more.

Whenever we come to the question of how a democracy can handle distant and complicated wars in the long term, those are the usual questions, but I am very surprised that we were at war and for two and a half or three years the war lasted going sideways and the president seemed to allow it maybe he didn't know what to do the Secretary of Defense his boss Don Rumsfeld I am very sorry to report that I was once in Washington in the middle of all this and heard him give a speech in which he talked about the so-called revolution in military affairs , which had more to do with the remodeling of the acquisition process at the Pentagon than with the actual combat that was taking place at the time, there is this strange feeling that for years like our troops were under fire and people were being killed and tens of thousands of Iraqis were dying, the people in charge of American democracy and the American military were fiddling, twiddling their thumbs, that can't be right, I was very frustrated, I think, I think the Um, that word surge is bad. and it is part of the problem, which is that the PE military said that some commander said that if we try to put more troopsin action, it will break the army, meaning they would not be able to sustain the numbers. and General King's answer to what was also mine, what is going to ruin the army more, sending more troops or losing a war?

And that I think was a big part of the argument, especially when it got to the president, but it's something that I think probably It's common as it happens in military history that to change a strategy you have to admit that the one you're following is wrong. incorrect and it is very difficult to say that it is very difficult for any commander to say which way we are fighting. mistake that had to be said had to be said and Rumold was one of the people who should have said it and he didn't like hearing it it's failing and we're failing and I guess I don't know, I don't know I know my Civil War history as well as I know I would like to, but at some point President Lincoln understood that if he continued with McCullen's strategy we would lose the war and he would lose the election, which would lead to losing the war, so he not only fired McLean, but he brought in a guy completely different general and understood that the strategy had failed.

It's very difficult to accept what was the famous quote when someone complained that Grant drank too much. I'm going to get it a little wrong, but I can't do without this man he's fighting with, that's absolutely true and he also supposedly said tell me what brand of drink and I'll give it to all my generals, yes exactly, and then General Marshall , as I recall, advances Dwight Eisenhower on a number. Too many generals were superior to him in seniority rankings to put him in charge of Well, Eisenhower comes in before Normandy begins to be planned, but he advanced a general he believed was capable.

Very important, what we did right and what we did wrong. in we're discussing a little bit about what we got wrong let's go back to Afghanistan in August 2021 President Biden orders a final withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan a withdrawal that I think it's fair to say became a route after being present in Afghanistan for 20 years, two decades and spending at least half a billion dollars. I think the number was higher than that and there are many different ways to add it up, but it's at least half a trillion dollars that the United States seemed to have achieved nothing.

The government we supported fell in one day and the Taliban recaptured Cabul before we had even completed our withdrawal. Can I give you a short multiple choice test? Was it a mistake? To enter in the first place It was a mistake to leave when we did It was a mistake to stay so long and to try to participate in this is to put a crudely national construction where the error lay I think we had to enter I think after 9/11 we had We had to fight terrorism and that was the place where the fight had to start, although I thought there were other places that were important, but for many reasons it had to start there, so I think your second part is "um he did it." We should have stayed that long and I think the answer is that we were constantly going down, constantly reducing our presence there.

MH and the two men responsible for removing him completely are Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A terrible agreement was reached. The thing about Trump and his ambassador Kazad, who signed an agreement with the Taliban, basically said that if you don't shoot us, we won't shoot you, that means the Afghan army is easy prey and I think that's where things started to go wrong. want. The Afghan military we had been training and trying to develop training and this was probably a mistake, we also trained them to rely on American air power so they were used to picking up the phone and calling for an airstrike and once. this agreement was signed, the airstrikes would not happen if the Americans were not under attack, although some commanders felt very bad about this and worked it out, but basically, it could be discussed and I would be open to this, but I don't know.

Suffice it to say with certainty that if we were going to build an Afghan army we should have avoided one that depended so much on American air power, but having built one that depended on American air power we should not have eliminated that air power when it could have been sustained with minimal effort and minimal casualties, at that time the Afghans were fighting almost all the fighting and we abandoned them, well Iraq. The moment being what it is, I can only ask for some sort of summary statements. Paul here, sorry, I'm not good at that, sorry, no, well, on December 20, 2011, President Obama declares the formal end of the US mission in Iraq and withdraws most of the remaining 39,000 US troops.

As Isis Gains Strength in Iraq President Obama Sends Relatively Small Numbers of Troops Back Today, U.S. troops in Iraq still number about 2,500, so here's a summary question for you. If you could name three things you wish we had done differently in Iraq, what would you start with? The question of whether we should have invaded in the first place or not now that we know what we know. Look, I think we were talking about an unusually cruel regime, very anti-American, very supportive of terrorism. There is no prospect of things getting better when Saddam dies because his two sons were even more monsters and when I hear people say well Saddam was a bad guy but the world is full of bad guys I know they have no idea what Saddam is like and if Then I say this bad invention the punishments that are worse than death and they couldn't imagine what is worse than death.

I said well, what if they rape your daughter and spread the video around the neighborhood or what if you die in a barrel of boiling oil or get sent to wild dogs? He terrorized his own population and spread the news throughout the Gulf that he was not one to trifle with as a very, very monstrous man. I think if that were the case, we would get to the question of alternative forms of history, if we had done so, if we had not invaded. if we had what the phrase was at the time, I think Mmeline Albright said we had it in a box, we had surveillance and the box was falling apart because the sanctions that contained it were supposedly breaking down and they were coming out, everyone saw this and by the way, although we didn't discover the stockpiles that we thought might be there, the CIA thought they might be there, it has been conclusive that the programs were still there and available to be started again and would have done so as soon as the lockdowns were lifted. sanctions, that was his goal, so if we hadn't gone in, let's elect him a decade later, he would have killed more of his own people and become a serious danger to us.

Is it that fair, I think? so I'm sure how I think he would have had a nuclear weapon, I probably don't want to put times on it, but I'm sure as quickly as he could he did it, as quickly as he could and he was getting a lot of outside help. getting Aon centes, for example, um, I think, uh, I think we would have seen not one but two emerging nuclear powers in the Persian Gulf and anyone who thinks we're better off in a competition between Iran and Iraq doesn't know how that competition came about. a war in 1980 that left 800,000, sorry, not 800,000 a million, I think that's the number or 900,000 Iraq-Iran War Iraq-Iran War 300,000 Iraqi dead and 600,000 Iranian dead, mostly from chemical weapons, many of them by chemical weapons, we would have seen a repeat of that. but on a much worse scale, possibly nuclear and more likely possibly biological, and the other thing is that we would have seen Saddam intervene everywhere he could, including Syria, to support Assad, not because he liked Assad but because he didn't like him.

I liked to see governments overthrown. probably even now in Gaza he would be intervening, he was that kind of man, so coming to the last questions, it has become the standard opinion, even among many Republicans, that the war was a mistake that the wars were mistakes but particularly That Rock was a huge mistake, we said we were going to go in because well, here is a clip that I would like you to see very briefly, in summary, there were no weapons of mass destruction, they said that there are weapons of mass destruction. destruction He was against the war where it started Do you think US President George W.

Bush lied? Look, I'm not going to get you a vote, but that's okay, let me, I'm just giving you another one, let me tell you something. I will tell you very simply: it may have been the worst decision to go to Iraq, it may have been the worst decision anyone has ever made, any president has made the history of this country, that is how bad this is, this is what happens: we have spent 2 billion dollars. in Iraq and fighting Iraq two billion two billion thousands of lives, right, we have hurt Wars those I love everywhere these are the most incredible these are braver than all of us in this room together I look at the attitude and I work with they and these are great people we don't have anything we don't have anything we're not even there we can't even make a phone call right now so how do you respond to that first and just President Bush didn't lie, the man who first brought that charge forward. ? discovered that a man named Joe Wilson was lying himself President Bush repeated what he had been told accurately repeated precisely what the intelligence agency had told him the intelligence agency there was a misinterpretation and the belief that there were reservations there and there weren't No, but as I said a few minutes ago, the capacity was there and would return once the sanctions were lifted, that was clearly Str Saddam's strategy as to the question of what's left and whether it's worth anything.

I think it's a lot. It's better to have an Iraqi government with all its flaws and, as is typical in that part of the world, not just that part of the world, let me not single out one part of the world, it has its corruption problems, it has its Iranian problems. There is infiltration but in general it is one of the most democratic Arab countries, they have periodic elections, they have people who resign when they lose the elections and they get along relatively well with the weaker countries of the Persian Gulf, the rich oil states, it is very far from Paradise , but it's a lot better than it would have been if you had a paranoid Megalo Maniac directing it, it's one of the most important countries in that part of the world.

The last question we have, the last question is about your

life

, really. In introducing you, I said that you decided for historical reasons and I think a kind of sense of personal morality, what was the right thing to do, that you would go into international relations. Somewhere listening to this there is a young Paul Woltz, there is a kid in college. maybe even be like Paul wol Paul wolitz in that he has an unusual talent for mathematics, he or she, and now this child is faced with a choice that you did not face. This kid is faced with the choice between joining an AI startup or some other tech startup. which is that they want to sell their product around the world and this Tech Elite is internationalist rather than specifically American many of them that is one option and the other option is Paul Wol Wood's option to dedicate himself to the United States and its foreign policy. what should that be?

Young listener, consider it interesting because in many ways I almost became a molecular biologist. I almost went to MIT to get a PhD in what you might call molecular biology. You have been richer, that's for sure and you would have been saved from several attacks. Paul, but look, when I was in high school I heard people endlessly say "better red than dead" and when you mentioned Hiroshima and you mentioned the Holocaust to me, those are the two polls that the world has to try to avoid and we have . Surprisingly well, considering the predictions that were made in I guess when the Soviet Union received its first bomb in 1948, I think I have my date, that's correct, and in fact, I think that, after 9/11, someone so wise like Gray Allison.

We even predicted that there could be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists before we knew it. I truly believe that the United States has a special role to play in steering the world between the poles of totalitarianism of absolute tyranny that is certainly alive and well in parts of the world. world now and wants to expand and the equally horrible outcome of a nuclear Holocaust and to be honest, I made the decision I made more than anything because I realized that when I had free time I was reading politics and history, I wasn't wasting my time. in the chemistry lab even though the guy I was working with was amazing, so the United States of America still matters, I think it seems, I think it matters and we have a lot of ways that we need to act together in ways that we don't. we have done and we are not making progress, but I hope we will.

I remember the pessimism about our future in the 1970s, there were many reasons for it and, within 10 years, we were like the Berlin Wall had fallen, yes, exactly, so I think. I think it's important to have an educated and wise public and an intelligent public and as I think about the type of issues thatwe've talked here, I was thinking maybe something about what sophomores I was going to say sophomores because they're the ones who are supposed to know everything, I think that's what the name means, what a dullness, where does it come from? the adjective sophomore, I guess so, but what the sophomore should know about Iraq and I think there's a lot of things we need to relearn and I hope I mean.

You're pessimistic about when we'll ever have an apolitical view of these issues, but I think it's very important to get over it and delve into what we can really learn from real history Paul Woltz, thank you, thank you Peter, for the insight into Onomon, Hoover. institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson